Up until now Bonjinsha has published one book with the previous year’s 1 & 2 level tests and another book with 3 & 4’s actual tests. This has always been a great way for students wanting to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test to become familiar with the test’s layout and get some [...]

The Japanese Graded Readers books are one of our best sellers for a reason. First quality Japanese readers are hard to come by. This fact alone makes this series all the more a valuable asset for any student of Japanese (Beginner-Intermediate).
Each set contains several booklets with a story graded to a certain [...]

Manga University has done it again. These guys are great at making Japanese (even difficult to remember yoji jukugo) seem easy.
Most of their goodies are really for beginners.  This book contains no romaji (yeah!) and is really for upper beginners and intermediates.  Beginners can enjoy it provided they have hiragana down well.
Yojijukugo (四字熟語) are [...]

For months White Rabbit Press had been out of the Volume One of their extremely popular Japanese kanji flashcards. Volume One covers all kanji needed for levels 3 and 4 (the easiest) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. We finally got our shipment in last week.
Here’s the thing. I said in the [...]

Today is Wednesday. In TheJapanShop.com land this means it is Super Suiyoubi! Today we are spotlighting two new readers: Read Real Japanese Essays and Read Real Japanese Fiction.

The cover price is $24. Today’s super price is $14—$10 off!
I’ve only read through about a quarter of the Essays book, but I’m impressed. [...]

I just got Philip Harper’s The Book of Sake in to consider it for our inventory. I’ll post a link once we get the real shipment in.
I read the whole book in a few hours (ahem, there are a lot of pictures). I now feel like my wife with computers—I now know enough [...]

Oh boy. I messed up a little this morning.
About an hour ago I was wondering why we had so few orders for today’s Super Suiyoubi deal. Sometimes the Super Suiyoubi deal is a big hit and sometimes it… isn’t. But today’s deal was for 20% off two of our most popular items [...]

Someone had mentioned they heard about one of our Super Suiyoubi deals from this blog. Far more people come here from links on TJS or TJP, but occasionally it goes the other way around. So, this entry will expand upon the bit about today’s deal found at TJS. Kansai Time Out.
Until tomorrow [...]

よくわかる文章表現の技術
I started stocking this book (for what reason I cannot remember) about a year ago, but it was only today I spent some time going through it. It is fantastic!
Basically this book’s goal is to get native Japanese speakers to think like non native Japanese speakers when writing Japanese. I mean, native [...]

宮本 武蔵 Miyamoto Musashi was perhaps Japan’s greatest samurai. Mifune Toshiro, the absolute coolest Japanese actor of all time*, played Musashi in a trilogy of movies called ‘Samurai’ in English.
One of my earliest posts here was announcing I had started to read Musashi by Eiiji Yoshikawa (in English). I forgot to mention [...]